"RadFems'" openly discriminate against the transgendered while clinging to a reactionary definition of sex

I’m
an endangered species. Nearly half of people like me attempt suicide.
Hundreds of us are murdered annually and, worldwide, that rate is only
increasing. Those of us who have a job and a place to live often lose
them both; too many of us can’t acquire either in the first place. What I
am is a transgender woman, one of the lucky ones.

I’m lucky
because I’m white, and because I have employment, housing and health
insurance. I can’t get too comfortable, though, because every few days, a
tragic headline reminds me of how fragile we are as a group:
“Anti-Transgender Bathroom Bill Passes,” “Transgender Inmates At Risk,”
“Transgender Woman Shot.” The world is not kind to us and the news never
lets me forget that sobering fact.

In some bizarre alternate
reality, however, I’m seen as a villain who invades “real” women’s
spaces and perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes. A small but vocal
band of activists known as “Radfems” see transgender women like myself
as a blight on the feminist movement, but — because their views are not
representative of the feminist movement as a whole — many
trans*-inclusive feminists refer to them as TERFs, or
Trans*-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

The chief TERF figurehead
is a Maryland attorney named Catherine Brennan who once served as a
liaison on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity. In July of 2012, a petition circulated to
have Brennan removed from that position because, to put it mildly, she
flatly rejected the “Gender Identity” half of her job description.

Apart from a sordid internet history of harassing, misgendering, and mocking trans* people, Brennan co-authored a letter with
Elizabeth Hungerford to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality
and the Empowerment of Women, to argue against — yes, against —
legal protections based on “gender identity or expression.” In so
doing, Brennan has effectively allied herself with those on the Right
who viciously deter trans* folks’ attempts to secure employment, housing
and safe public spaces.

Since vacating the American Bar
Association liaison position, Brennan has continued to spread her
anti-trans* viewpoints at the annual Radfem conference. Every year, the
Radfems gather in a “women-only” space to promulgate their politics of
exclusion. Every year, however, conference organizers find it even more
difficult to book space as people begin to recognize the Radfems for
what they are: a hate group.

Jacobin needs our support

Bhaskar SunkaraJuly 15, 2013

On July 10, the left-wing magazine Jacobin published an article by Samantha Allen titled "CounterPunch and the War on Transgender People,"
which challenged a strand of radical feminism whose proponents, in
Allen's words, see a transgender woman as someone who "invades 'real'
women's spaces and perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes," and who acts
"as a blight on the feminist movement."

In particular, Allen singled out Catherine Brennan as a leading
proponent of trans-exclusive radical feminism--to the extent that
Brennan has argued "against legal protections based on 'gender identity
or expression,'" according to Allen. Allen also cited the CounterPunch
website for publishing an article by Julian Vigo that defended Brennan
and condescendingly attacked transgender activists for daring to
criticize those who consider them a "blight."

Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara
recently announced that Brennan, in response to Allen's article, has
reportedly begun legal action against the magazine--and that Jacobin is raising funds for a legal defense. Here, we reprint his call to contribute to Jacobin's legal defense--and hope SocialistWorker.org readers will support it.

Dear readers,

This week we were pleased to publish a wonderful essay by Samantha Allen on "CounterPunch
and the War on Transgender People." It's a moving piece that brings to
life the type of discrimination that trans* people experience on a daily
basis.

In the piece, Allen laments the fact that portions of the Left,
including some self-described feminists, are still bullying this
vulnerable population. What's more, these reactionary voices are even
finding outlets in some of our best publications, like CounterPunch.
As Allen writes, "...pundits of both liberal and radical varieties can
demonize us, ignore us, and question our legitimacy because they can get
away with it."

As is the case with many other issues--and largely due to a lack of time and resources--Jacobin
hasn't provided a very good counterweight to these tendencies. That's
why we were so proud to publish Allen's piece, and it's one of the many
reasons we stand behind it without reservation.

But not everyone is so pleased with its publication. Catherine
Brennan, whose views are critiqued in the essay as being transphobic,
has instructed her lawyer David Diggs to prepare litigation against
Jacobin magazine.

It's
been weeks since I testified at the court-martial of Private Bradley
Manning, and I still don't know how to explain to anyone what that
experience was like. I don't even know how to feel about what I saw
there.

Everything seemed simple before, and now it's really not.
It used to be easy to take a bird's-eye view of the entire situation. I
saw it as some abstract network of people, events, morals,
responsibilities, laws, consequences, past, future, the connections
between them, and some process of justice or historical consensus that
would resolve all this in favor of one definitive outcome or another. It
was easy to talk about what Manning did, debate the ethical and legal
character of his actions, and calmly contemplate what should happen
next.

That was my attitude going into this - there were facts,
they would eventually add up to an answer, and I didn't need to give
much thought to anything beyond that. For me, the facts were simple: I
had spoken with Manning online for several months in 2009, after he took
an interest in my fledgling YouTube channel, and long before his leaks
of classified material. His defense team believed our conversations
could show that Manning cared about his country and wanted to protect
people, contrary to the government's assertions that he had recklessly
placed America and its troops at risk. And so I was called by the
defense to testify about what Manning said to me: that he felt he had a
great duty to people, and wanted to make sure everyone made it home to
their families.

Flying out to Baltimore was disorienting; I hadn't
been apart from my fiancee and our kids for over a year, and now I was
on my own in a city I'd never visited before. Still, I took it in stride
and tried to think of it as something that was going to happen,
something I'd get through no matter how it went, and then it would be
over - the same things I would always tell myself before a dental
appointment. As if this were no more than some temporary discomfort or
inconvenience to my life. I drew on the same strategy I used when
nervous about flying, or transitioning, or coming out to my family:
pretending that all of this was completely normal to me. Of course,
having to pretend meant that it very much was not, but I tried not to
think about that.

"Miss McNamara?" Sgt. Valesko, clean-shaven and
wearing a sports jersey, recognized me at the baggage claim and
introduced himself. He carried my bags outside, where Sgt. Daley was
waiting to drive me to my hotel. I joked about the fact that I was quite
literally getting a ride in a black government van. As they showed me
some landmarks around the area - Costco, Olive Garden, and a
high-security prison - we all got to know each other. Daley told me
about growing up in Shreveport, attending a superhero-themed wedding in
Seattle, and shattering his wrist in a motorcycle accident; I showed him
the thick five-inch surgical scar on my abdomen. They thought it was
great. It was surprisingly easy to talk to them - they were very
friendly, and it really put me at ease, even when I was still struggling
to get a handle on everything that was happening.

Bradley Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks
trove of secret disclosures, faces a possible maximum sentence of 136
years in military jail after he was convicted on Tuesday of most charges
on which he stood trial.

Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge
presiding over the court martial of the US soldier, delivered her
verdict in curt and pointed language. "Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,"
she repeated over and over, as the reality of a prolonged prison
sentence for Manning – on top of the three years he has already spent in
detention – dawned.

The one ray of light in an otherwise bleak
outcome for Manning was that he was found not guilty of the single most
serious charge against him – that he knowingly "aided the enemy", in
practice al-Qaida, by disclosing information to the WikiLeaks website
that in turn made it accessible to all users including enemy groups.

Lind's
decision to avoid setting a precedent by applying the swingeing "aiding
the enemy" charge to an official leaker will invoke a sigh of relief
from news organisations and civil liberties groups who had feared a
guilty verdict would send a chill across public interest journalism.

The
judge also found Manning not guilty of having leaked an encrypted copy
of a video of a US air strike in the Farah province of Aghanistan in
which many civilians died. Manning's defence team had argued
vociferously that he was not the source of this video, though the
soldier did admit to the later disclosure of an unencrypted version of
the video and related documents.

Lind also accepted Manning's
version of several of the key dates in the WikiLeaks disclosures, and
took some of the edge from other less serious charges. But the
overriding toughness of the verdict remains: the soldier was found
guilty in their entirety of 17 out of the 22 counts against him, and of
an amended version of four others.

The guilty verdicts included
seven out of the eight counts brought under the Espionage Act. On these
counts, Manning was accused of leaking the Afghan and Iraq war logs,
embassy cables and Guantánamo files "with reason to believe such
information could be used to the injury of the US or the advantage of
any foreign nation". The 1917 act has previously been reserved largely
for those who engage in spying as opposed to leaking; the seven
convictions under the act are likely to be seen as a major stepping up
of the US government's harsh crackdown on whistleblowing.

The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the
military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would
necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.In lockstep with administrators of the nation’s war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant’s culpability weighed heavy.“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the
burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in
the front parlor of the charnel house,” another defendant, Fr. Daniel
Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial,
45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom
where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good
order.

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise,” wrote Berrigan, one of
the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on,
removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville,
Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. “For we are
sick at heart…”

On the surface, many differences protrude between those nine
draft-files-burning radical Catholics and Bradley Manning. But I wonder.
Ten souls saw cruelties of war and could no longer just watch.

“I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy,” Manning wrote
in an online chat. Minutes later he added: “I think I’ve been
traumatized too much by reality, to care about consequences of
shattering the fantasy.” And he also wrote: “I want people to see the
truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you
cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Those words came seven weeks after the world was able to watch the “Collateral Murder” video that
Manning had provided to WikiLeaks. And those words came just days
before military police arrived to arrest him on May 29, 2010.

Today Bradley Manning was convicted on 20 of 22 counts, including
violating the Espionage Act, releasing classified information and
disobeying orders. That's the bad news. The good news is he was found
not guilty on the charge of "aiding the enemy." That's 'cause who he was
aiding was us, the American people. And we're not the enemy. Right?

Manning
now faces a potential maximum sentence of 136 years in jail. When his
sentence is announced tomorrow, we'll all get a good idea of how
seriously the U.S. military takes different crimes. When you hear about
how long Manning – now 25 years old – will be in prison, compare it to
sentences received by other soldiers:

Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the
senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib and the senior
officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manadel
al-Jamadi, received no jail time. But he was reprimanded and fined $8,000. (Pappas was heard to say about al-Jamadi, "I'm not going down for this alone.")

30 July 2013, 19:30 UTC

Today Bradley Manning, a whistleblower, was convicted by a
military court at Fort Meade of 19 offences for supplying the press with
information, including five counts of ’espionage’. He now faces a
maximum sentence of 136 years.

The ’aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away. It was only included,
it seems, to make calling journalism ’espionage’ seem reasonable. It is
not.

Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes,
sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the
quintessential whistleblower.

This is the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower.
It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security
extremism. It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and
must be reversed. It can never be that conveying true information to the
public is ’espionage’.President Obama has initiated more espionage proceedings against
whistleblowers and publishers than all previous presidents combined.

In 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that
praised whistleblowing as an act of courage and patriotism. That
platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document
described whistleblowers as watchdogs when government abuses its
authority. It was removed from the internet last week.

Throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the
absence of any victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that -
or even claim that - a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley
Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed Mr. Manning was
working for a foreign power.

The only ’victim’ was the US government’s wounded pride, but the
abuse of this fine young man was never the way to restore it. Rather,
the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust
at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of
strength, but of weakness.The judge has allowed the prosecution to substantially alter the
charges after both the defense and the prosecution had rested their
cases, permitted the prosecution 141 witnesses and extensive secret
testimony. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him
naked and isolated him in order to crack him, an act formally condemned
by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture.

This was never a
fair trial.The Obama administration has been chipping away democratic freedoms
in the United States. With today’s verdict, Obama has hacked off much
more. The administration is intent on deterring and silencing
whistleblowers, intent on weakening freedom of the press.

The US first amendment states that "Congress shall make no law...
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". What part of ’no’
does Barack Obama fail to comprehend?

The
press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that
the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud
services cannot be trusted

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden
is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden
wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most
of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would
not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists
was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations
are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or
gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a
spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why
the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public
service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA)
had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of
citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone
records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has
been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

Similarly,
without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government
should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business,
offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton
and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of
people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious
debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just
an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the
proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty
significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of
Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned,
though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a
constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel
plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The
"human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA
revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and
the direction in which it is heading.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

“JUST CAUSE:” ISN’T IT TIME FOR ALL WORKERS TO HAVE MORE JOB SECURITY?

I'm
glad to see a few other working class activists besides myself finally
beginning to speak out about the need for a struggle to put an end to
"At-Will Employment" although we need to put an end to "At-Will Hiring
and At-Will Firing" which would assure fairness and non-discrimination
when it comes to both hiring and firing.

It is bad enough
employers have the "right" to exploit the labor of workers; employers
shouldn't have the "right" to determine who should work and who
shouldn't work based on any forms of discrimination--- be it age, sex,
racial, political thinking & ideology or whether workers are engaged
in union organizing activities, drives & campaigns.

Class
collaboration among the top circles of leaders of organized labor has
prevented a campaign to repeal "At-will hiring and At-will firing" since
these labor "leaders" believe employers have more rights than workers
and they are for going along to get along with employers which has
proven to be detrimental to union organizing as the declining membership
in unions proves.

When I introduced a resolution to repeal
"At-Will Hiring and At-Will Firing" at the Minnesota Democratic
Farmer-Labor Party's State Convention in Duluth, it was then Minnesota
AFL-CIO President Ray Waldron and his little toady, Mark Froemke, who
organized opposition to the resolution--- more organizing than either of
these labor-fakers have done in their entire lives. This resolution was
defeated by about a 70% majority vote which tells us a great deal about
the commitment of the Democratic Party for justice for working people;
and, it tells us a great deal about why organized labor, while doing the
bidding of employers, can't organize Wal-mart, Marvin Windows and
Doors, Arctic Cat, Polaris, Digi-Key or any of the other large non-union
employers in Minnesota... there is even the huge Northshore mining
operation that Cleveland Cliffs operates that the huge United Steel
Workers Union hasn't been able to organize because all the rank-and-file
organizers keep getting fired because of "At-Will." Then there was the
failed Canal Park organizing fiasco where organized labor couldn't even
organize a couple hotels... again, because of "At-Will Employment."

Not
one single Democratic Party politician has had the moral or political
courage to take on the repeal of "At-Will Employment." What does this
tell us about the Democratic Party and labor?When I first brought
forward Precinct Caucus resolutions to repeal "At-Will Employment" here
in Minnesota I was told by every single sitting member of the DFL
Caucus in the State Legislature that the obstacle was Republican
Governor Tim Pawlenty. Well, now there is a Democratic Party
super-majority with a billionaire Democratic governor supported by the
Rockefellers claiming to be sympathetic to organized labor and the State
Senate leader is Tom Bakk who claims to be a leader of the Building and
Construction Trades unions and working people can't even get a hearing
on the repeal of "At-will hiring and At-will firing." Of course, these
same labor loving Democrats left Minnesota's Minimum Wage at $6.25 an
hour, too; below the Minimum Wages of Mississippi and even North
Carolina and Wisconsin.

Not one single labor "leader" from Change
To Win or AFL-CIO unions in Minnesota has brought forward the need to
repeal "At-will hiring; At-will firing;" why not? Because they fear a
struggle with employers and their Democratic Party partners over this
issue.

Unless At-will hiring and At-will firing are both
confronted at the same time I doubt we can successfully replace At Will
Employment with "Just Cause" because workers of color, women and the
youth understand that they will remain the last hired and never get jobs
in the first place... this is why for over 40 years I have pushed the
idea that we need to challenge the "rights" of employers over hiring and
firing. Here in Minnesota, fair employment hiring could take place
through the Minnesota Workforce Centers with these government centers
matching workers to employment opportunities; why would any employer not
want to get employees through these centers which employ professionals?
One reason only--- employers want complete control over workers and
their work-forces.

The repeal of "At-will hiring; At-will firing"
is all about justice and democracy... it is all about workers, who are
human beings, forced by economic circumstances and an unjust economic
system being entitled to human rights.

The "Doctrine of At Will
Employment" has to go--- it is a thoroughly reactionary concept dating
back to the days of the emerging industrial industrial revolution when
employers believed they had the "right" to treat workers like shit.

Here is an interesting perspective deserving of wide discussion:

The
United States is alone among industrialized countries in allowing
workers to be considered "at will" employees and dismissed for any
reason – justified or not, unless protected by a union contract or
individual agreement. Labor should seize the opportunity to champion the
passage of "just cause" standards into state laws. It's a labor law
reform proposal that will appeal to all workers while putting employers
on the defensive.

“JUST CAUSE:” ISN’T IT TIME FOR ALL WORKERS TO HAVE MORE JOB SECURITY?

by RAND WILSONJuly 30, 2013 4:03 pm

The
next collective bargaining battleground is likely to be the job
security provisions of union contracts, including the “just cause”
clause.

Instead of waiting for such an attack, labor should seize
the opportunity to champion the passage of “just cause” standards into
state laws. It’s a labor law reform proposal that will appeal to all
workers while putting employers on the defensive.

It’s long overdue.

The
United States is alone among industrialized countries in allowing
workers to be considered “at will” employees and dismissed for any
reason – justified or not, unless protected by a union contract or
individual agreement. Governments such as France, Germany, Japan and the
United Kingdom require employers to have a “just cause” to dismiss
non-probationary employees. Just cause appeals to basic fairness, just
as due process does in court. Workers who believe they have been fired
unfairly have the opportunity to contest their dismissals before various
types of industrial tribunals. In the U.S., such recourse is available
only to public employees with civil service protection and/or
union-represented workers with access to a negotiated
grievance/arbitration procedure.

At-will employees have no job
security: they can be fired for a mistake, an argument with a
supervisor, a critical comment about the enterprise or management,
taking a sick day, a complaint about working conditions or pay, or
involvement in outside political campaigns – all activities that
just-cause protected workers can take part in without worry.

One
state has passed a law: The Montana Wrongful Discharge from Employment
Act was passed in 1987. Applicable to non-union non-probationary
employees, it prohibits discharges without good cause, allows workers to
sue for up to four years of back pay, and provides a method for workers
to recover attorneys’ fees. Despite fear-mongering by opponents, the
Big Sky state’s robust economic growth has not been affected. Statutes
in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands also prohibit termination without
the slightly more ambiguous “good cause.”

Winning state “just
cause” legislation would certainly not be easy. But building a movement
to win it offers union leaders and activists an opportunity to champion
an issue that would benefit all workers and also help union growth.
Short of winning state legislation, local unions, Central Labor Councils
and workers’ centers could seek to enforce a community “just cause”
standard through workers’ rights boards and / or strategically applied
public pressure on employers.

A “just cause for all” campaign
could engage working people at many different levels. One can imagine
communities declaring certain areas “just cause zones” while other
activists could be involved using the proposed legislation as a “litmus
test” for politicians to gain labor support in electoral campaigns.
Still others could be involved in holding hearings on the importance of
achieving a “just cause for all” standard and lobbying for resolutions
with their city councils.Some union leaders have voiced concerns
that winning just cause for all could make the main reason workers join
unions irrelevant. However, if just cause campaigns succeed, workers
will have more security to participate in union campaigns. Union leaders
and organizers will be able to make the point that they are experts at
enforcing just cause protections and can provide representation at
hearings etc.

Even if campaigns for just cause do not succeed,
millions of non-union workers will learn about the concept (especially
if campaigns are based on ballot referendums) and the increased security
it could bring to their lives. By popularizing the just cause concept,
more workers may respond by thinking, “If we can’t get this important
protection through legislation, let’s get it by forming a union!”

Meanwhile,
when employers seek to roll back the just cause articles in our
contracts, union members won’t be in the same position we were with the
attacks on health care and defined benefit pensions. Instead, we will
have laid important groundwork to fend off the employers’ attack by
building broader public support for union job security provisions.

Imagine
the labor movement leading a $50 to $100 million campaign over the next
five years to win just cause protections for all workers in eight to
ten states where grassroots movements have shown a desire to pursue it.
Employers (and their political handmaidens) would be on the defensive.
Most likely they would spend five or ten times more than our side to
defend the “freedom to fire.” By over-reaching, it would actually help
us raise more awareness about the importance of having just cause job
protections.

A major Just Cause for All campaign would make labor a
champion of the 99 percent and spur more workers to form unions. The
sooner we get started the better!

Rand Wilson is currently on the
staff of SEIU Local 888 in Boston. Wilson was the founding director of
Massachusetts Jobs with Justice and has been active in community-labor
coalition building for more than 30 years. This article is adapted from a
forth-coming article in Democratic Left.

Army private faces sentence of life in military custody with no chance of parole if convicted on 'aiding the enemy' charge

Bradley Manning, the self-confessed source of the massive WikiLeaks
trove of US state secrets, will learn his fate on Tuesday when a
military judge announces her verdict in the most high-profile
prosecution of an official leaker in at least a generation.

The
army private faces a possible sentence of life in military custody with
no chance of parole should Colonel Denise Lind find him guilty of the
most serious charge – that he knowingly "aided the enemy" by
transmitting intelligence to WikiLeaks.

In the course of the
eight-week trial, which ended on Friday, the US government sought to
create a new precedent by arguing that Manning knew he was helping
al-Qaida when he released more than 700,000 documents to the
anti-secrecy website.

The verdict will be issued at 1pm ET by Lind sitting alone in the courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland,
in the absence of a jury – an arrangement made at Manning's own
request. The soldier's decision to put his faith in a military judge,
rather than in a panel of his peers – the military equivalent of a jury –
was a big legal gamble whose merits will become clear when the verdict
comes in.

In another huge legal roll of the dice, Manning decided
to plead guilty to a lesser version of 10 of the 21 counts of which he
is accused, carrying a possible maximum sentence of 20 years in military
jail. He did so with nothing in return in the form of a plea bargain, a
highly unusual step in criminal proceedings.

The outcome of the
trial has huge potential ramifications, not just for Manning personally
but for the wider health of investigative journalism in the United States.
Leading media experts have warned that a guilty verdict on the most
serious charges could send a devastating chill across news outlets by
frightening away potential official leakers.

This time, we can’t blame the Republicans.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of legislators in the House came
extraordinarily close to passing an amendment that would have prevented
the National Security Agency from collecting bulk data on Americans. The
Amash-Conyers amendment would have limited Section 215 of the Patriot
Act to apply only to individuals subject to investigation under that
law, barring mass surveillance programs like PRISM.

Failing by a 217-205 vote,
the amendment earned support from an unlikely coalition of Republicans
and Democrats—a group that could perhaps lead future legislative
rebellions against the surveillance state.

A majority of Democrats actually supported the amendment, in defiance
of party leadership, the White House and the NSA itself, which, in a
moment of panic, organized an emergency meeting the day of the vote in
which director Keith Alexander personally lobbied against the measure. At the end of the day, 83 Democrats still voted against it.

Most of the “no” votes came from what Glenn Greenwald characterized
as the “establishment” wing of the party. These include figures like
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), once a fierce critic of the Bush
administration’s attack on civil liberties, and Minority Whip Steny
Hoyer (Md.). Hoyer, who sent out an alarmist and factually incorrect
email to House Democrats in his efforts to shoot down the amendment,
asserting that it would bar the NSA and other agencies to collect
records of people who “may be in communication with terrorist groups.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) also
voted against the amendment, as did Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee Chair Steve Israel (N.Y.).

But in addition to the more predictable defenders of the White House
and the national security state, the “no” camp included support from
some Democrats who typically lean left on a number of issues, from the
economy to military spending and even civil liberties. With the
Amash-Conyers amendment failing by such a close margin, these key
Democrats could have helped swing the vote.

Eight of those votes to defend the NSA’s blanket surveillance came from
the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), the left flank of the
Democratic Party in Congress.

Though it failed by a twelve-vote margin, Congressman Justin Amash’s
(R-MI) amendment last week to curtail the NSA’s dragnet surveillance
efforts reveals new fault lines in the debate over privacy. The roll call
for the vote shows that 111 Democrats and ninety four Republicans
supported the measure, which was co-sponsored by Amash’s Democratic
colleague, John Conyers.

The amendment failed as the White House and NSA director General
Keith Alexander personally lobbied lawmakers to oppose the measure. At
first glance, a look at the ‘no’ votes seems to suggest an odd coalition
of establishment Republicans and Democrats rallying to support the
administration’s position. Congressman Darrell Issa, a Republican who
casts himself as a leader on privacy issues and as a tough opponent of
most of President Obama’s domestic policies, voted against the Amash
bill. So did minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who, as The Huffington Post reported, previously criticized the section of the Patriot Act enabling large-scale data-mining as a “massive invasion of privacy.”

Why would an anti-Obama Republican and a supposedly pro-privacy Democrat join forces to uphold the NSA’s surveillance policies?

MapLight, the Berkeley-based campaign finance website, has aggregated
the numbers and found that lawmakers “voting to continue the NSA’s
dragnet surveillance programs received on average 122 percent more money
($41,635) from defense contractors and other defense industry interests
than did representatives who voted to end the programs (18,765).” Amash
has received a mere $1,400 from industry PACs and individuals.

Profit-driven defense contractors, like Booz Allen Hamilton and
Boeing, manage the lion’s share of the government’s surveillance
efforts. While it’s unknown at this point if any of the firms involved
in the NSA’s domestic spying efforts attempted to influence the vote,
the evidence suggests that recipients of defense contractor cash are
more likely to vote to support NSA policies.

Keep Calm, and Encrypt
— this slogan, a play off Britain’s World War II posters, is the
privacy-seeker’s new motto in the age of mass surveillance and data
mining. The idea is that even with the expansion of surveillance, some
data can still be kept away from eavesdroppers, as long as it is
properly encrypted. It is the assumption behind whistleblower Edward
Snowden’s insistence
on only communicating via encrypted conduits and it is the basis for
watchdog groups like the Freedom of the Press Foundation to help
reporters learn how to communicate through such conduits with their sources.

Using encryption is clearly a smart move in this Orwellian era. After all, even with the NSA’s impressive codebreaking abilities,
secure encryption still works. In fact, when done properly, it works so
well to preserve privacy and lock data away from snoops that the
government has now kicked off an aggressive campaign to turn the concept
of “secure encryption” into an oxymoron.

Specifically, the Obama administration has launched an initiative
to force tech companies to give the NSA a set of Internet-wide skeleton
keys. The radical move, which would let law enforcement agencies access
vast troves of encrypted information, adds significant questions to the
ongoing debate over privacy. It begs us to ask not only whether the
government has a right to vacuum up millions of Americans’ private data,
but also to ask whether the security-conscious among us should even be
allowed to retain the right to make data truly secure?

The word “right” is important here — the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution does not only bar unreasonable searches and seizures nor does it only
mandate probable cause for searches. In addition to all that, it
enshrines “the right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects.” In the digital age, it shouldn’t be a
stretch to assume that such a precept means a basic right to access
tools that keep personal property, including data and intellectual
property, secure.

That tool is encryption — aka software and hardware that codes data so
that it is locked and inaccessible to everyone except those who are
specifically given a key. But as CNET’s Declan McCullagh
reports, “The U.S. government has attempted to obtain the master
encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users’
private Web communications from eavesdropping.” Accurately describing
the move as “a technological escalation” in the government’s effort to
conduct mass surveillance, McCullagh goes on to explain why this is such
a big deal:

Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the
derelict center; the metropolitan area as a whole lost population
between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major cities.
Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained
more than a million people over the same period, roughly matching the
performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra boost from oil.

Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit
gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying,
where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the
economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which
children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their
parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit. And it’s far
lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even
though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.

So what’s the matter with Atlanta? A new study suggests that the city
may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out
of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods. Sprawl may be
killing Horatio Alger.

The new study
comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which is led by
economists at Harvard and Berkeley. There have been many comparisons of
social mobility across countries; all such studies find that these days
America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity,
actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced
nations. The new project asks how social mobility varies across U.S.
cities, and finds that it varies a lot. In San Francisco a child born
into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has an 11 percent
chance of making it into the top fifth, but in Atlanta the corresponding
number is only 4 percent.

When the researchers looked for factors that correlate
with low or high social mobility, they found, perhaps surprisingly,
little direct role for race, one obvious candidate. They did find a
significant correlation with the existing level of inequality: “areas
with a smaller middle class had lower rates of upward mobility.” This
matches what we find in international comparisons,
where relatively equal societies like Sweden have much higher mobility
than highly unequal America. But they also found a significant negative
correlation between residential segregation — different social classes
living far apart — and the ability of the poor to rise.

Why we pretend the next storm won't happen—and flush billions in disaster relief down the drain.

Two
months after Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City, Battery Park is
again humming with tourists and hustlers, guys selling foam Statue of
Liberty crowns, and commuters shuffling off the Staten Island Ferry. On a
winter day when the bright sun takes the edge off a frigid harbor
breeze, it's hard to imagine all this under water. But if you look
closely, there are hints that not everything is back to normal.

Take
the boarded-up entrance to the new South Ferry subway station at the
end of the No. 1 line. The metal structure covering the stairwell is
dotted with rust and streaked with salt, tracing the high-water mark at
13.88 feet above the low-tide line—a level that surpassed all historical
floods by nearly four feet. The saltwater submerged the station,
turning it into a "large fish tank,"
as former Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota
put it, corroding the signals and ruining the interior. While the city
reopened the old station in early April, the newer one is expected to
remain closed to the public for as long as three years.

Before the storm, South Ferry was easily one of the more extravagant stations in the city, refurbished to the tune of $545 million in 2009
and praised by former MTA CEO Elliot Sander as "artistically beautiful
and highly functional." Just three years later, the city is poised to
spend more than that amount fixing it. Some have argued that South Ferry shouldn't be reopened at all.

The
destruction in Battery Park could be seen as simple misfortune: After
all, city planners couldn't have known that within a few years the
beautiful new station would be submerged in the most destructive storm
to ever hit New York City.

Except for one thing: They sort of did know. Back in February 2009, a month before the station was unveiled, a major report
from the New York City Panel on Climate Change—which Mayor Michael
Bloomberg convened to inform the city's climate adaptation
planning—warned that global warming and sea level rise were increasing
the likelihood that New York City would be paralyzed by major flooding.
"Of course it flooded," said George Deodatis, a civil engineer at
Columbia University. "They spent a lot of money, but they didn't put in
any floodgates or any protection."

And it wasn't just one warning.
Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change's report, an assessment
of global warming's impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding.
"Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened," says
Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, co-chair of the Panel on Climate Change,
and the co-­author of that 2001 report.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Et tu, Bruté? So much attention is being paid now to the anti-gay horror unfolding in Russia that the LGBT community and health care advocates are completely missing an equally horrifying new law in Greece.

The idyllic birthplace of lesbian poet Sappho and Greek mythological gods such as Adonis may
not be so alluring now that another Adonis—Greek Health Minister Adonis
Georgladis—has reinstated a measure that not only requires mandatory
HIV testing but enables Greek police to stop anyone—including
tourists—they suspect of being HIV-positive and force them to be tested.

“Health minister Adonis Georgladis has reinstated Public Health
Decree 39A, a 2012 measure that allows police to detain people suspected
of being HIV-positive and force them to be tested, according the Greek news outlet ENET. The measure also urges landlords to evict tenants who are HIV-positive (as a public health threat).

In April 2012, the measure was the catalyst for the forced testing of
hundreds of women. The 17 that were discovered to be HIV-positive were
splashed across media outlets, with their personal information and
photographs published for the world to see. They were characterized by
police as "prostitutes" despite the fact that there no evidence was ever
provided to back up the accusations. After the women were detained for
months, the regulation was repealed and they were sent home.Now that same measure is being implemented again.

Greece has been seen as increasingly fearful of people with HIV.
Rates of the virus have risen over 200% since 2011, most likely due to
increased drug abuse and rising unemployment among young adults, which
is now over 20%. According to the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV
infections among injecting drug users has doubled from 206 to 487 since
2011. At the same time, HIV prevention budgets have taken a major cut,
from 35 million Euros in 2010 to 20 million last year.

If the 1968 minimum wage grew with inflation, it would be
$10.67 today. Unfortunately the federal minimum wage is a miserly
$7.25. According to the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. CEOs of major
companies earned 18.3 times more than a typical worker in 1965 and in
2012, CEO pay was 202.3 times more than typical worker pay.

Don’t you think it’s time for a raise?

Fortunately, Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) has
introduced H.R. 1346, the “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013,” which would
raise the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour and index it to inflation.

We started the Time for a Raise campaign to help mobilize
citizens across the country to encourage Members of Congress to support
the H.R. 1346 and catch up with 1968.

Here’s how you can help:

Visit TimeForaRaise.Org and sign our petition.
The single most important thing we can do to is to make sure members of
Congress hear from their constituents on this issue. Each petition will
be presented in person to your Member of Congress to request a town
meeting in your district focused on raising the federal minimum wage.
This means every signature counts!

We need citizen leaders in each Congressional district
to be district captains to help spread the word about the need to raise
the federal minimum wage. Captains will gather signatures, present
the collected petitions to their member of Congress and help with media
outreach. The time commitment is low — no more than a few days of work —
and the upside is high: exercise your civic muscles as a community
activist; meet with your Member of Congress; and, most importantly,
correct a major injustice by helping thirty million Americans making
less than $10.50 per hour receive the increased federal minimum wage
they deserve.(Email pdavis@timeforaraise.org to be a district captain.)

Every step in our nation’s
struggle for fair working conditions — from overtime pay to the 40-hour
workweek to the original federal minimum wage — has been hard earned.
This step will be no different. However, if you sign our petition,
become a district captain and spread the word about our campaign, we
will have a serious chance of securing the increase in the federal
minimum wage that low-wage workers have long deserved.

This
week marked the four-year anniversary of the last time Congress
increased the minimum wage — from $5.15 in 2007 to $7.25 in 2009. Groups
demonstrated across the country, demanding increases at both the state
and federal level. President Obama pledged that he would continue to press for an increase in his economic policy speech at Knox College.

But
there’s another problem: Millions of working Americans make less than
minimum wage. In fact, more Americans are exempt from it than actually
earn it.

The Pew Research Center
examined Bureau of Labor Statistics data and found that about one and a
half million Americans earned the minimum wage in 2012, but nearly two
million people earned an hourly wage that was even less than $7.25 an
hour. These workers, for one reason or another, are exempted
from the part of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) that requires
employers to pay at least the minimum wage, and include tipped workers
and many domestic workers, as well as workers on small farms, some
seasonal workers and some disabled workers.

The
largest of these exempted groups is tipped employees, many of whom work
in food service. Today, tipped employees earn just $2.13 an hour — the
rationale being that tips cover the rest. In fact, some of these workers
do earn a reasonable living through their tips, but, as Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, told us, many don’t.

“Imagine
your average server in an IHOP in Texas earning $2.13 an hour,
graveyard shift, no tips,” she said. “The company’s supposed to make up
the difference between $2.13 and $7.25 but time and time again that
doesn’t happen.”

The
Obama administration proposal laid out in the State of the Union
calling for $9 an hour also called for an increase in the minimum wage
for tipped workers, and for that increase to be indexed to inflation. At
the moment, the minimum for tipped workers
has not changed for 22 years, because, in 1996, Congress detached
tipped worker wages from the normal minimum wage at the bidding of the
National Restaurant Association — a powerful lobbying organization
headed, at the time, by Herman Cain. This leaves millions of tipped
workers — a group that is mostly women — living in poverty.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson